Ask HN: How do you manage photos, philosophically?

Whenever you are bored (e.g. waiting in line, commuting to work, stuck in a waiting room) use the time to "curate" the photos in your phone, removing duplicates or photos of things you don't want to remember.

I use imagemagick for that

cd myphotodir

montage -geometry 1024x768+0+1 -tile 4x3 -background Dim\ Gray *.JPG myresume.jpg

Take care of not having a file named 'myresume.jpg' in that dir or it will be overwritten. Modify the parameters to suit your needs.

To remove duplicates or n-plicates in the current directory tree use rdfind

rdfind -deleteduplicates true .

All photos are renamed with perl to include the timestamp in the filename. Thus If I want to see for example all photos of 27 sept in any year, a simple bash command connecting find with eog will do the job. I can pass then the list of photos to imagemagick. Very useful to see grow changes in the garden or in children birthdays for example.

And then perl is connected with postgresql

Yes, I think it's digital clutter. I expect this is not a widespread behavior, but I haven't taken a photo in 15 years except when required to in order to make a home insurance claim and I snap the parking lot at the airport every time I travel in order to remember where I parked. I'm not going to forget my kids and, frankly, I think they deserve some level of autonomy and privacy not often granted to children. You have no idea how embarrassed they may be in the future and whether they really want those pictures to exist. But when I said this publicly to a friend who was constantly spamming naked photos of her twins to social media, she became no longer a friend, so I understand it's a sensitive subject.

You said yourself you never look at these. People storing multiple terabytes to a NAS and cloud backups likely don't have the time left in their remaining lifespan to ever look at everything they're storing. It's digital hoarding.

On the other hand, I don't think it's completely valueless to at least record a few special occasions. I appreciated a few Christmases back after my mom digitized all of the Betamax tapes from when I was a kid that she had taped my sister's birthday where one of my very first friends was present and singing along and playing with us, since that friend died when we were 12 and I haven't seen her in three decades. One video was enough, though. I don't need a number of photos I couldn't look through if I had until the heat death of the universe.

I would honestly compress the photos. You don’t need ultra hd pictures for your memories.

Big cardboard box, hdds, thousands of photos, sd cards, dvds, ect.

The Cloud is no solution at all, they're a revisionist nightmare.

I'd honestly prefer all my most valuable memories, from my family tree, on physical media, buried in a filing cabinet with a sign that says 'beware the tiger' in the basement of some forgotten farmstead, built on rock, a million miles from Jeff Bezos.

It's safe there. Everything else is just constant churn.